Amaravati (Andhra Pradesh) [India], Mar 14 (ANI): Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Wednesday expressed grief over the demise of prominent British theoretical physicist Professor Stephen Hawking who died at the age of 76.

“Hawking is a great scholar who had overcome physical inability and explored many spatial secrets. He is a great teacher who had delivered complex scientific issues in simple language and made them accessible to the layman,” Naidu said.

A family spokesperson of Professor Hawking announced his death earlier today.

Professor Hawking’s children in a statement described him as a great scientist and an extraordinary man, whose work and legacy will live on for many years.

The British physicist was the subject of the 2014 film ‘The Theory Of Everything’, which starred British actors Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones respectively, Sky News reported.

In 1963, Professor Hawking contracted a motor neuron disease that gradually paralysed him over the decades. He was still able to communicate using a single cheek muscle attached to a speech-generating device.

He was the first to set out a theory of cosmology explained by a union of the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, a fundamental theory in physics which describes nature at the smallest scales of energy levels of atoms and subatomic particles.

Professor Hawking is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

In 2002, he was ranked 25th in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) poll of the ‘100 Greatest Britons.’

His book – ‘A Brief History of Time’, a popular-science book on cosmology, had appeared on the British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks in the 2000s. (ANI)